Basilisk and Uno
by solnishka
Summary: Uno, a rookie Freedomer from Spain with terrible fighting skills, finds himself drawn to an enigmatic ex-Monolithian with a terrifying gaze.
1. Chapter 1

"You don't want to go in there, rookie," Yar called.

Uno flinched guiltily and looked down the hall, to where the aging technician was playing poker with several other Freedomers—specifically Eastwood, Pirate, and Basilisk.

"Why?" Uno asked.

"'Cuz there's a Space anomaly."

Uno blinked. "A Space anomaly," he repeated. "In our base."

"Ain't that what he _just _said, rookie?" Eastwood demanded. "Yeah, it's in there. And it ain't movin' none, so don't go sticking your nose in it and you'll be fine."

"Your accent is atrocious," Pirate said, scratching under her eyepatch. "_And _your grammar."

"Go fuck yourself," the American growled, and the game resumed.

Uno watched them for a while, his hand still on the doorknob to the room that apparently had a Space anomaly inside it. He wasn't really sure that they were telling the truth; only two days ago another Freedom veteran had had him running all over Dark Valley searching for a stash that didn't exist—but this would be easy to prove. He opened the door.

And found a translucent, glow-y, lavender-ish sphere, its diameter larger than he was tall, filling an old, dilapidated storage room. It was making a faint thrumming noise.

Uno stared at it. He dug a hand into the thigh pocket of his sunrise suit, pulled out a bolt, and tossed it into the anomaly. There was a small, lavender-colored flash and a _glurp_ noise, and the bolt vanished.

Uno waited. Nothing happened.

He glanced down the hall again and saw that the poker game had paused.

"Well, at least he didn't try and touch it," Pirate said.

"Is it supposed to do anything?" Uno asked.

Eastwood dramatically groaned and leaned back in his chair. "Oh, for Chrissake, just leave the kid to his fate. He's gonna get himself killed."

"A Space anomaly transports anything that goes inside it to another place," Basilisk said in his usual heavy monotone. He turned his namesake stare on the rookie, which made Uno feel instantly uncomfortable and in dire need to be somewhere else. "You never know what that place will be. Sometimes it is a different place in the Zone. Sometimes it is an airless vacuum. It is best not to go inside them."

"Can we _play _the fucking _game_?" Eastwood demanded.

Basilisk turned and looked at the other stalker. The American froze for an instant, transfixed, then quickly looked away.

"I agree," Pirate said, breaking the silence that followed. "Let's play. Leave the rookie to his fun."

"I have a _name_, you know."

"We know your name," Basilisk said, thankfully without looking up from his cards.

Uno didn't have a reply to that, or at least not one that he wanted Basilisk to potentially look at him while responding to. He watched the veterans raggedly resume their poker game, then turned back to the Space anomaly. It was still making that weird thrumming noise, and hadn't changed in any way since he had thrown in the bolt.

He wandered away, thinking.

Fifteen minutes later Uno came back, carrying a bag full of trash. Pirate, Eastwood, Yar, and Basilisk were still playing poker. Uno could feel them watching him out of the corners of their eyes as he opened the door to the Space anomaly room and pulled several cartridges out of the bag. The crumpled brass cases gleamed forlornly in his palm before he tossed them in.

The Space anomaly went: _glorp_, _mip!_, and _zrrrr_ as the cartridges vanished. Nothing else happened.

Uno waited. Nothing.

He tossed in an empty vodka bottle. _Zerk_.

A handgun that was beyond even Yar's ability to repair. _Kptah!_

A _full _bottle of vodka, whose noise was indeterminate behind Eastwood's yelp of shock and dismay when Uno started pouring it out.

The stalkers had given up even pretending to pay attention to their game. Their cards were in their laps, and all of them were watching as Uno tossed object after object into the anomaly. After a while he stopped and looked back at them.

"Do you think something different would happen if we put something _really big_inside it?" he asked. He spread his arms for emphasis.

"Like what?" Yar asked in turn, interested in spite of himself.

"Well, we could start up that abandoned tank in front of the—"

"_No_."

"Okay." Uno frowned in concentration for a moment, then brightened. "What about—"

Something sailed out of the Space anomaly and hit Uno's shoulder. The rookie startled, then lunged to catch it before it bounced back inside. It was a rock with a piece of paper tied around it. Something had been written on the paper.

"There's a message!" Uno exclaimed. "It…" He trailed off, frowning again.

"What does it say?" Pirate demanded, standing up and leaning forward, bracing her hands on the rickety folding table. Yar grabbed the edge as it wobbled dangerously.

"It says 'stop fucking throwing things, asshole'."

* * *

In the Duty base, General Voronin snarled at the anomaly that had decided to take over half his office and began throwing the trash littering his floor back through it.


	2. Chapter 2

Uno sat in a corner on the Freedom side of Yanov Station, slowly chewing a piece of jerky. It was as tough as shoeleather and didn't taste much better, and the salt stung the raw flesh of his split lip. He was chewing on the left side of his mouth even though the effort of chewing was making it sore, because the right side was even sorer as well as swelling beneath a bruise left by a bandit's fist. His supplies now consisted of the food in his hand and a bottle of water sitting next to his foot. Everything else had been taken.

Uno stared down at the dirty floor in front of him, trying to think of a way to un-fuck his life. A solution presented itself in the form of a pair of boots coming to stand in front him. He looked up, saw Basilisk staring down at him with his arms folded across his chest, and immediately changed his mind.

"…Hi," Uno said, his eyes darting to the door behind the ex-Monolithian's legs before he could stop himself. Basilisk didn't react; he was probably used to other stalkers eying the exit when he approached them.

"Can you do a funeral service?"

Uno coughed on his jerky, then managed to recover himself. "For, uh, for who?" he asked hoarsely.

"Havoc."

Uno had a few vague memories of a red-haired member of Basilisk's little band of ex-Monolithians, one who crooned songs to his gun as he cleaned it and cradled it against his chest when he slept—like a child with a favorite toy, a talisman against the horrors of the dark.

"I'm sorry," he lied.

Basilisk's expression didn't change. "You won't do the funeral?"

"Wha… no, no, I meant—I'm sorry for your loss."

Basilisk blinked, which was rare enough to be worth mentioning. His eyes had earned him his name: they were a very bright green, and had a piercing quality that nobody in Yanov Station could tolerate for more than a few seconds at a time. To look Basilisk in the eye was to get the feeling that he was figuring out a dozen different ways to kill you as well as reading your mind.

Uno looked at the space next to the ex-Monolithian's ear while waiting for a response. Eventually, Basilisk spoke: "The body is outside."

He turned and left. Uno grabbed his water bottle, stuffed the jerky into his pocket, and followed.

What was left of Havoc was lying next to one of the train cars outside of the station. A pair of blind dogs were gnawing at it. Basilisk drew the pistol at his hip and killed one, and the other yelped in terror and ran away. He holstered the pistol, unslung his assault rifle, and tossed it to Uno. The rookie Freedomer caught it awkwardly.

"Keep watch while I dig," Basilisk ordered. He picked up a shovel lying next to the corpse.

Uno was still looking at the assault rifle. "What is this?"

"SG 550."

"What does that mean?"

"Means it's a good gun. _Keep watch_, rookie."

"Right, right." Uno held the rifle gingerly. It was a tool and therefore meant to be used—but it was also a type of gun he had only seen a few times before, and was probably worth his life if it somehow broke into pieces in his hands. After a few more seconds of anxious staring he managed to tear his gaze away and start scanning the hilly, irradiated terrain surrounding them.

Basilisk dug. It was a hot day, the sky a cloudless blue and the sun a white-hot hammer against the tired, dry anvil of the earth. There was no wind. Flies whined and buzzed around Havoc's corpse, which was already rotting and stank to high Heaven. Uno leaned against the rusted side of a train car, watching a mirage shimmer against the horizon. The loudest sound was the shovel biting down into the dirt and Basilisk's heavy breathing. His face was red from exertion, and sweat had plastered his hair to his head and ran down his face. He had taken off his pack, but had kept his heavy Kevlar armor on.

Eventually, Uno couldn't stand it any longer. "Hey," he said, making Basilisk look up. "Take a break." He tossed him the water bottle.

Basilisk caught it, uncapped it, and drank deeply. Uno watched as a trickle of water spilled out of the corner of his mouth and ran down his neck, vanishing below the collar of his shirt. When the bottle was empty the ex-Monolithian held it for a moment, looking down at it before looking back up at Uno.

"You gave me your water."

"Uh, yeah."

"Why?"

"Because… you looked thirsty?"

Basilisk kept looking at him. Uno was sweating now from more than just the heat of the day, and he made the mistake of meeting the ex-Monolithian's eyes—and was trapped.

He drowned in a sea of pitiless green as the whine of the cicadas became louder and louder around him. He drowned, hypnotized, held immobile the way the eyes of a snake might paralyze a bird.

He's going to kill me, Uno thought, at the same time that Basilisk said something.

Uno flinched and came back to himself.

"What?" he croaked.

"I will repay you," Basilisk repeated.

Uno nodded dazedly and looked away, gripping the assault rifle tighter. He stared towards the horizon without really seeing anything, breathing shallowly and letting the heat of the day sink back into him. The ice that had somehow crawled up his spine to twist around his heart melted. He heard cloth rustling, and then the reassuring noise of the ex-Monolithian digging. When Uno's heart-rate returned to normal he chanced a look at Basilisk.

His Kevlar armor was lying next to his discarded Freedom jacket and blue-and-white striped undershirt, and without his usual, bulky clothing he was… very fit. From neck to wrists Basilisk was pale and untouched by the sun, his arms and shoulders ropily muscular and the faint lines of abdominal muscles crossing his stomach. But there was a starkness to his collarbones and a thinness in his fingers that spoke of hunger, too, and far too many scars.

He looked down at the assault rifle that Basilisk had given him, then up at the ex-Monolithian's unarmored torso. Then back to the rifle.

"You're not going to shoot me," Basilisk said without looking up. He continued to dig, then walked slowly around the grave while looking down into it.

"How do you know that?"

"You're not a killer."

Uno opened his mouth to reply, but there was a rustling from the underbrush surrounding them. The blind dog had come back. It slunk closer, growling softly, and Uno reacted without thinking. He stooped, picking up a fist-sized stone from the dirt at his feet, and lobbed it with all his might towards the dog. The stone struck its muzzle and the dog fled, yelping in pain with blood on its nose and lips.

"I gave you that gun for a reason," Basilisk said.

"I didn't want to waste your ammo," Uno replied, which was at least partially the truth.

Basilisk grunted, dug out a few more shovelfuls of dirt, then appeared to be satisfied. "It's done," he said, turning his horrific stare on the rookie Freedomer again. "Say the words," he commanded.

"Which ones?" Uno asked.

"Any. Just… say them. Havoc liked to listen to that Dutyer preacher. Say some words about God."

"I… I don't know religious words in Ukrainian." Uno knew some. He knew that God was _Boha_ and angel was _anhel_, but that was about it. He didn't know the verb for _to pray_.

Basilisk looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "Say them in your native tongue."

"Okay," Uno said. He took a deep breath and looked away, up to the blue of the sky, and thought of his grandmother in Zamora praying the rosary. She did that every morning and evening, even as the cancer that ultimately killed her made her hands shake like leaves in the wind. Uno had hated it. Why bother? God hadn't cured her, despite her faith and her goodness. God had let her die. God had let Havoc die, too, who was Basilisk's only friend. Now Basilisk was alone and Uno was alone too, and Basilisk wanted him to 'say some words about God', that bastard, that utter _bastard_.

"Okay," Uno said again. He walked the two steps to Basilisk and took the ex-Monolithian's hands, feeling the warmth of his skin and the calluses on his fingers. He folded them together gently in a praying position, held them there for a moment, and then let go.

"_Padre Nuestro_," Uno began, folding his own hands, "_que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre_." He thought of Zamora baking under the summer sun, just as the Zone did, of the closed coffin containing his grandmother's skeletal, tumor-ridden body being lowered into the grave around which too few mourners gathered. He thought of Havoc, unhinged and violent but as devoted to Basilisk as a knight to his lord, soon to be buried in a dirt hole around which two dirty, probably cancerous men stood.

"_Venga tu reino. Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo. Danos hoy nuestro pan de cada día_." Beside him, Basilisk breathed quietly, his hands still folded.

"_Perdona nuestras ofensas, como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden. No nos dejes caer en tentación y líbranos del mal_. Amen."

Uno took a deep, shuddering breath and opened his eyes. Basilisk was already moving, kneeling down to cradle Havoc's body against his chest and carry him into the grave. He curled the ex-Monolithian's body in on itself, arranging his limbs as though Havoc was sleeping, then stepped out of the grave and began shoveling dirt into the grave. Slowly, Havoc's body was entombed.

Numbly, Uno gathered two mostly-straight branches and tied them into a cross with a bit of string, driving it into the soft earth at the head of Havoc's grave. Basilisk nodded approval, then looked up at the rookie Freedomer.

"Your words were good," he said.

"Thanks," Uno said. He licked his split lip, forced himself to look into Basilisk's eyes—and didn't drown. He handed the SG 550 back.

Basilisk shouldered the gun and turned back towards Yanov Station. "I have food for you, and some other things."

"What things?"

"Things you need. Now come on, rookie."

Uno followed him.


End file.
